Brest, Toulouse, soon Grenoble and Ajaccio… The cable cars are coming to town
Will all the metros in France and Navarre one day be replaced by cable cars? Surely not. Is cable transport therefore condemned to transbahuter ad vitam aeternam skiers and only skiers? No more. The reality lies between these two extremes. In the coming years, we will increasingly use cabins to get around in urban areas. But not anywhere.
“In the city, each mode of transport has its area of relevance; the urban cable is complementary to metros, buses and trams”, summarizes Bruno Plumay, of the transport engineering company EGIS. This is also the reason why Toulouse opted for this solution, stopped on May 14. With a hill to climb, the Garonne to cross and a departmental road to cross, the cable has become the best solution to connect three major centers of the agglomerationin this case the oncopôle, the Paul-Sabatier University and the CHU Rangueil.
This mode of transport like no other does not only have the advantage of making it easy to overcome obstacles. By occupying the air, it is never caught in traffic. With a frequency of 10 seconds between two cabins, it avoids waiting times. It is also quite inexpensive. And then, in these times of global warming, it emits little CO2 and does not need a lot of energy. This is why 66 cities have already adopted it around the world, including Algiers (the pioneer, from the 1950s), but also New York, London, Medellin or La Paz.
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Decision makers don’t think about it
So why don’t we see more of it in France? Partly for image issues. In our imagination, the cable car remains associated with the mountain, so that decision-makers do not think of it spontaneously to get around town. “In Toulouse, when an engineer launched the idea in 2006, everyone started by bursting out laughing, before the studies proved him right”, recalls Francis Grass, deputy mayor and president of the Société de la mobility of the Toulouse conurbation (SMAT). It is also true that its speed is quite slow and its flow less important than that of a metro (but still equivalent to that of a tram in one hour, thanks to its frequency). Finally, it often worries local residents, who fear noise pollution and, above all, the bird’s eye view of travelers on their apartment. “These fears are real, but partly unfounded, underlines David Aubonnet, sector manager at RATP. Noise pollution has disappeared since technical developments have made it almost silent. As for the view, there is no no difference between an aerial metro and a cable car: in all cases, travelers embrace the entire landscape without being interested in a particular home.”
This is why, with delay, France begins to convert to this technique. After the pioneers Brest, Toulouse and Saint-Denis-de-la-Reunion, other projects have been announced in Grenoble and Ajaccio for 2024 and between Créteil and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, in Ile-de-France, in 2025. All is not rosy, however. The projects planned in Orléans and south of Lyon have been abandoned while the one retained in Bordeaux faces opposition and must be submitted to “consultation”.
Conclusion ? When it comes to moving huge numbers of passengers, the metro is unbeatable. When the space is clear, the tram or the bus do the trick. On the other hand, if there is a river, a mountain, a highway or a railway line on the route, the cable car is an option to be examined in a simplified way. In other words, the urban cable is not and will never be THE solution. On the other hand, it is imposing itself as one of the possible solutions. And not just during the winter holidays.
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